April Fools: Situation Report -- April 1, 2013

As you may know, the Warhound was removed very early in the Heart of the Swarm public beta test because we felt that its role overlapped with the Marauder a bit too much. Mechanically, these two units were virtually identical, but were produced from two different buildings. It’s never an easy decision to remove a unit, but this decision was particularly tough because we absolutely loved the Warhound’s art.

After watching the MLG Winter Championship, we noticed that Life was able to beat Flash a little too easily in the finals. Had Flash been able to build Warhounds, our favorite race (Terran) may have won the tournament. As usual, we made a spur-of-the-moment decision based on this match and immediately set about rebalancing the game.

Accordingly, we reintroduced the Warhound into our internal builds for testing purposes. It felt great to have the Warhound back when we played as Terran, but when we played against them using our favorite race (Zerg), it somehow felt very wrong. Obviously, we couldn’t have that, so we decided that we must also give the Warhound to Zerg.

After putting some more thought into it, we realized that our favorite race (Protoss) was getting the short end of the stick because it was the only race without the Warhound. That’s when it came to us: Protoss should have it as well, since one of our main goals in StarCraft II was to create as much symmetry as possible amongst all three races.

So after considering every angle, here’s what’s changing:

The Warhound has been added for Terran because robots are cool and the art is amazing

The Warhound has been added for Zerg to remain competitive with Terran.

The Warhound has been added for Protoss to keep Protoss players from whining about them on the forums.

While we know these changes are drastic, we encourage everyone to log in and spend some time playing before rushing to judgment. We welcome you to share your thoughts, but this time around we’re not going to be listening to feedback.

For more information on the story behind the Warhound please check out the Warhound Q&A and the latest entry in our StarCraft short story series “Command Performance”.